In the previous episode, we started a timeline that chronicled the parallels between the ancient Roman Empire and the United States of America today. When we left off, the Roman Empire was deteriorating thanks to the inflation caused by deficit spending on war and public works. Their government was constantly making things worse by meddling with their economy.
Now, their empire was stretched to its limit and under constant attack from barbarians. The ongoing cost of war, plus the huge amounts of deficit spending, was bringing Rome to its knees. Now we’re going to continue our journey through to the fall of Rome, and learn of more striking parallels with the United States along the way.
The Romans were the first culture to have social programs. The Athenians had great public works and they had the expense of war. But in Rome, they had the expense of all their great public works, they had the expense of war. But in Rome, they had the expense of all their great public works, they had the expense of massive armies occupying foreign lands, and they had the expense of social programs.
During the end of the Roman Empire, Rome’s population was approximately 1 million people, and 200,000 of them, 20%, were receiving daily distributions of wheat. That’s welfare. As their empire decayed, Roman leaders employed a tactic called bread and circus to keep the public distracted and placated.
The bread refers to the free grain, also known as the dole, and circus translates to the games that would be held here in the Colosseum with free food, wine, and rather violent entertainment. I find it absolutely fascinating to try to imagine what was happening here nearly 2,000 years ago.
These seats would have been filled with people eating and drinking, many would be yelling for their favorite gladiator, and a good portion of the audience would have been mindlessly drunk. The emperor is an elite watching from up on high? What a scene! So the Colosseum is a great example of both the huge expense of Roman public works and the endless deficit spending they carried out to pay for supposedly free stuff.
But is there such a thing as a free lunch? Breads and circuses give away oil, give away grains, and give away wine, and people would love you. They conquered Egypt. By golly, that was a lot of grain you could give away. But what it did was destroy the economy.
And when you put in the taxation to pay for it all, what it did was destroy the small farmer. And so the wealth creation that would enable you to do these things went by the boards. And so it became a vicious, vicious cycle. So now let’s continue filling in our timeline from the previous episode so that we can keep track of where we are in the story.
Welfare, bread, and circus were basically distraction tactics used by the ruling elite who would offer promises of free stuff to ingratiate themselves with the public. There’s a famous quote from the satirist Juvenal who summed up the situation very succinctly, give them bread and circus and they will never revolt. The citizens felt like they were getting these things for free when they were actually paid for by a crushing double blow of continuous currency debasement and increased taxation.
In the end, the only way that the Roman rulers could enforce this tax collection was by doubling down on their stifling bureaucracy. The size of their government compared to the private sector exploded, business became incredibly difficult, and many simply gave up.
Steve Forbes just mentioned how difficult the situation became for farmers, or husbandmen as they were referred to in the past, here’s a quote that backs that up from Lactantius around 300 AD. There began to be fewer men who paid taxes than there were who received wages, so that the means of the husbandmen, being exhausted by enormous impositions, the farms were abandoned, cultivated grounds became woodland, and universal dismay prevailed.
All of these tourists go through the Coliseum here all amazed at the ruins of a great civilization, and I have to ask myself, are they asking themselves, what happened to these people? Why did this thing fall into ruin? Everybody goes and they buy these trinkets at the gift shops and postcards and books, and they have their pictures taken here and there.
I don’t think any of them are thinking about the fact that most countries on the planet are doing exactly the same thing today. Most of what Americans know, I fear, is what movie stars are doing, what sports stars are doing and what occurred on the last installment of Jerry Springer or some other reality show.
And the food stamps are not even food stamps anymore. They give you a credit card that you can buy your food with so that you look like you can actually afford to eat as opposed to living off the dole. It’s, yes, it’s very similar. People’s relationship to money in a country like America, the biggest economy in the world, is based entirely on the benefits they get from consuming and consumerism.
And right now, you have an era of popularization of drugs that are being used, like Prozac and other drugs, that people are taking massive quantities of while they’re consuming popular culture for instant gratification. So instant gratification enhanced by drugs with a consumer culture with easy credit.
So people are literally high all day long. They’re consuming, they’re taking, they’re on drugs. They’ve got cheap sugar. They’ve got cheap, high fructose corn syrup in America thanks to those massive government subsidies. So they’re basically spinning their tits 24-7, 365. Now as soon as that value proposition changes and you’re not getting high as easily as you did yesterday, the cost of getting blitzed out of your skull on cheap drugs, cheap sugar and cheap entertainment tips to an actual cost where you’ve got to actually put in a day’s labor, then you’re
going to see social unrest. Then you’re going to see real change because those people suddenly are going to be facing reality without the benefit of being on drugs. And that’s going to be a day when suddenly this economic model of consumption at the expense of humanity comes to a screeching halt. So the ancient Romans had welfare, bread, and circus.
Today the USA has welfare and mass distraction. We’ve had the Colosseum-like venues for our games and theater for a long time, and now we also have people filling these Coliseums to watch digital gladiators battle each other in virtual e-sports events. These sporting and electronic spectacles, along with mindless entertainment like talk shows, are piped directly into our homes on TV or now even to the cell phones in our pockets.
We have the same politicians who constantly make impossible promises of free stuff and a good portion of the population are hypnotized into believing them thanks to our modern version of bread and circus. Just like in ancient Rome, the USA has increased taxation in an attempt to pay for all of the so-called free stuff.
And not surprisingly, we are now also burdened with a stifling bureaucracy in order to enforce the ridiculous amount of rules, taxes, and regulations. The size and scope of government has gone past anything that the founders of our country could have imagined in their worst nightmares, and now we face the same problem as ancient Rome. There are now fewer and fewer productive individuals and businesses left to fund the buffoonery of government.
Remember, governments cannot create prosperity. They can only consume it. prosperity, they can only consume it. Now we’re going to take a side trip so that I can show you some of the real world effects of all this excess bureaucracy. We’re going to meet a new friend who belongs to the group of people who suffer the most under burdensome laws and taxation, small business owners and entrepreneurs.
These individuals are the lifeblood of an economy and when a government stands in their way it stands in the way of progress, choice and a higher standard of living for us all. We’ve been in many many restaurants all over the world. And we came back to Rome on the way to Venice solely so that we could stop and eat at Fiora di Zucca, our favorite restaurant in the world.
And we’ve got the owner here, Roberto. We believe that government is very poor at doing things and that if government was running your restaurant, it would not be exceptional. We agree. He agrees, and I do too. One of the things that we feel is sort of difficult and dangerous these days is that people are very upset with the economy, and they want the government to do something about it.
And I believe that the best thing that government could do is to make it easier for small businessmen like you to do your job. This is what makes the economy good. And personalities like yours. Absolutely true. The government and the state is really not helping the small business in any way. If I had had government help, it could probably open more of them.
You don’t need government money though, what you need is just for government to get out of the way and make it easier to go into business. Not so many rules, not so many taxes, right? In ancient Rome, the government was telling you how much you could pay your workers and no more, no less.
The government was telling you how much you could charge for that buffalo mozzarella and that flatbread. If the government told you everything you could do, would you want to stay in business even? Absolutely not. It just becomes a big McDonald’s for everybody. Yes. This is the problem. Right. This is the problem. Right. This is the problem. We live in a state we call the People’s Republic of California because the government has made so many rules it is becoming very difficult for a small businessman.
Here it’s the same problem. It’s like they are trying to do everything to take us away from this country. If you had the courage to go somewhere else you probably would do it. It’s a struggle to stay here. I have all the same problems on the other side of the world. All I want is for government to get out of the way and let me do my job.
I feel like I have found a brother. My brother! Roberto is still in Rome and I love nothing more than supporting his exceptional restaurant whenever I’m in the area. But since filming this segment, the burdens placed on my business in California became so totally unbearable that I had no option but to move operations out of state.
It pains me deeply to watch history repeat like this, as this affects people’s lives, including some of the best employees and friends I ever had. The role of government, among other things, is creating an environment where people can go out and do creative things. Our founders understood. We are born with certain energies.
The question is are those energies going to be directed in a positive way or a destructive way? There are two ways you can get ahead. One is to steal from your neighbor and the other is to go out and provide a product or service that somebody else wants, create something that hadn’t existed before out of your mind.
You take the risk and you do it and we all benefit from it. And that’s why it’s so important to have that proper environment. And what makes up that environment? You don’t have to be a PhD, in fact, it will probably get in your way. One is the rule of law, where you know what the rules are. Sound money, sensible taxation.
Taxes are a price and a burden. And if you lower that burden, people are able to focus and do more real things, making it easy to set up a legitimate business. Just basic rules and people will do amazing things. Amazing amount of creativity can be released. But beware of government saying we’re here to help you.
Usually they end up harming us all. Government benefits but not the rest of us. One of the things I’ve noticed is we keep on putting people in charge that not only don’t know anything about monetary history, but they don’t know the fundamental economics that a normal business man would know.
Any business owner or just somebody that is able to control their own finances at home. What they hire are people that, they’re quants that have theories in their head. They’ve got some book knowledge, but they’ve never actually hired a person. They’ve never made the books balance or had to go out and make sure that there’s more profit coming in this month than expenses so that they don’t go out of business.
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. It’s this fascination, this love affair that the world has with academic economists in the last 20 years. I think you’ll find, like everything else, it goes full circle.
At some point in the next 20 years, I think you’ll find, like everything else, it goes full circle at some point in the next 20 years, we’ll have central banks staffed exclusively by successful business people who’ve been brought in to fix the mess that bureaucrats and academics have fostered upon us. Actually, I think an even better future would be a world without central banks, where the free market is left alone to decide what money is. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Anyway, back to the story.
Let’s look at the last two entries on our timeline for both ancient Rome and the USA and see if we can use them to predict what comes next. If you have more currency flowing into the government in the form of taxes, and then multiply that by more bureaucrats, what does that equal? If you guessed the corruption of the political process, you’d be spot on.
In ancient Rome, one of the fastest ways to accumulate personal wealth was to hold office and bestow favors on individuals or businesses in return for gifts. In other words, bribery. In the modern USA, I hate to say it, but not a lot has changed. Cronyism is now the norm in Washington. This is where industries and individuals can basically buy a politician to vote a certain way.
In some cases, we’ve seen their influence extend to the highest levels, where outsiders are writing the legislation and having their cronies introduce it. We’ve also seen the advent of revolving door politics, where politicians may not take cash directly as bribes, but as soon as they’ve fulfilled their purpose in politics, they walk out the door of public disservice and into highly paid positions in the private sector. How convenient.
So, when we take a look at our timeline, the parallels are really starting to stack up. Our political and monetary experiments never seem to end, and I know I’m not the only one who feels like we are accelerating towards something really big. I’m not the only one who feels like we are accelerating towards something really big. Now I’d like to introduce you to my friend Chris Martinson. He has an absolutely wonderful series called The Crash Course that I highly recommend that you watch.
Chris is a scientist and entrepreneur who does an excellent job of clarifying complex systems and scenarios. So I wanted to get his take on why it feels like we’re speeding toward the edge of a cliff. Tell me about exponential growth, because this was one of the pieces in your series that I was blown away by.
You know, there’s this famous quote by Keynes, that not one man in a million understands inflation. The inflation process is very important. I think it’s one man in a billion that probably understands what exponential growth is, and it’s one of the most important things that we could get our arms around. And the reason it’s so difficult to talk about is because we’re humans and we’re not wired for exponential growth.
We think in linear form. So if something goes from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 people get a sense of that. We know how that works. But when something goes from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32 and just mushrooms off, well it’s much harder to understand it. And we’re surrounded by exponential growth. It’s in our economy. It’s in our monetary numbers.
It’s in our debt numbers. It’s in environmental statistics. It’s in how rapidly we’re depleting things in an inverse exponential decay. It’s in everywhere we’re surrounded by. So understanding is really critical. So I have a couple examples to help people understand what exponential growth is and why it’s so hard.
So if I had two erasers and I said, all right, I’m going to give you $100 based on how evenly you can bring these two erasers together, nice even speed, you’ll do a great job at that, right? You’ll win a hundred bucks from me every single time. But now let’s replace them two big heavy magnets, you know, a great job at that. You’ll win $100 from me every single time.
But now let’s replace them with two big heavy magnets, you know, neodymium magnets, maybe from a Tesla coil, you know, something really awesome. And you’ll do what everybody does. All of a sudden they’ll snap together, right? And it’s because these magnets are pulling together with exponential force. And even though you might be physically capable of controlling that, your mind and your muscles and your neurons won’t be able to wire that up.
I’ll give you 100 shots and it’ll still be doing this because we just aren’t wired for that. Another exponential example that really helps bring this home. Do you have a park, like a favorite park that you wouldn’t mind seeing getting ruined? How about I think they’re going to decommission Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
Perfect. All right, let’s use that as an example. So here’s the thought experiment. Imagine I have a magic eyedropper and it’s magic because the drop of water that comes out of this eyedropper will double every minute. So after one minute you get two drops and after two minutes you get four drops and after six minutes you can fill the thimble up.
All right, so let’s do two things. We’re going to make this part watertight, and I’m going to handcuff you to the highest row of bleacher seats. And let’s start this tomorrow, 12 o’clock, you’re handcuffed up in this highest row of bleacher seats, and I go down right into the center of the field and I put one of these magic drops down.
Now, here’s the question. How long do you have to escape from your handcuffs knowing that this park is going to fill up with water? Okay, one drop and it’s got to fill the entire park. How about a day? A day. Good. That’s close. What if I told you the answer is 50 minutes? Wow. You can think 51 minutes, you know, if you want to get rid of the skepticism, right? So that’s amazing, right? Just 50 or 51 minutes and it’s all over.
The whole park is full. That’s not the important question. Here’s the important question. At what time is this park still 97% empty space? It’s not filled with water. And do you realize the seriousness of your predicament? Well, I know it would be half full one minute before my predicament. So, I don’t know, 10 minutes? 5 minutes. 5 minutes, okay.
So if we go back just 5 minutes in time, there’s a little bit of water in the infield. And then 5 more minutes and it’s over. And so when I look at this, I look across the world and I think, there’s a little bit of water in the infield and then five more minutes and it’s over. And so when I look at this, I look across the world and I think, okay, from all of human history until 1960 to put the first three billion people on the planet and then just 40 years to put the next three billion people on the planet.
And this is important because the Earth is our stadium and we’re living through one of the most extraordinary periods of human history, not just American history, not just in our personal lifetime history, but human history.
Because you and I will be alive during a time when human population will have fully tripled from roughly 3 billion to 9 billion if we live to ripe old ages. It’s extraordinary. It’s putting pressure on everything. And that exponential human growth is putting the curve on all those charts we just talked about. How fast we’re depleting oil, how much food we have to grow, airline miles traveled, loss of tuna from the oceans, how much money has to be created, all of that is being driven by this exponential process and so something I really like to be able to communicate to people is that exponential processes speed
up at the end. So if anybody watching this has the sense that maybe things are going faster and it’s harder to keep up with events and wait what’s happening in Europe, it seems to be crumbling fairly quickly, that’s because we have all these exponential processes converging on this one moment in time and yes, things really are speeding up here and now.
The system they have is failing, it’s falling apart, Keynesianism won’t work. To me we’re in the beginning stages of what happened to the Soviet system. We may be like at 1987 in the Soviet system where two years later, four years later it was gone and that could happen to us.
And as long as people will still use the dollar, it’s going to continue. But we’re getting dangerously close. And the end stages of a currency system comes rapidly. So even though we’ve been slipping and sliding for 100 years, our dollar is now worth two cents over a hundred years. That’s pretty much of a crash, but it isn’t a crash in the sense of going off a cliff.
And I believe that history shows that currencies eventually can go off a cliff when a false confidence is just dissipated. And we have a confidence, but it’s based on all false notions and maybe out of desperation, a lot of rigging. But anyway, it’s still working. false notions and maybe out of desperation, a lot of rigging.
But anyway, it’s still working. The dollar, although weaker as an international currency, still works. But that is what we as a people and not only the United States, around the world have to fear because it will affect the whole world when this comes. And this is why this issue for me is so important.
We are in big trouble and there’s just no way out and I am sorry to say about that and I love my country and I’m sick to death about what’s happening to it because of morons in government and a big bunch of morons in academia who let the Federal Reserve do what it did. It’s all so simple. It could have all been prevented.
But just by following the damn Constitution, money shall only be silver and gold. How simple can it be? It’s less than a dozen words. And all you got to do is follow that. Yeah, we have got a prayer. Only people who got a prayer are the people who are buying silver and gold today. You and me. What amazes me are the stark similarities between ancient Rome and today.
Once again, we’re debasing the currency to pay for war, social programs, public works, while we keep the society placated with bread and circuses, football, sports, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars. Our government keeps on getting bigger as our military aspirations expand our empire.
Congressman Ron Paul recently stated that we have over 900 military bases in 130 countries. That is an empire. And that brings us to one of the most dangerous parallels between ancient Rome and the USA, the excessive influence of the military on government. Rome’s elite realized very early on that keeping the military happy was of the utmost importance if they were to either gain or stay in power.
As a result, the military grew in size and attained high levels of leverage throughout politics. In today’s USA, we spend trillions of dollars on our military and it has grown into a behemoth. Much of the revolving door politics mentioned earlier comes as a result of the massive deficit spending that we pump into so-called national defense.
Our country has become a war machine. We are on offense, not defense, and there is now an entire industry reliant on keeping things this way. And it’s not as though we haven’t been warned about this. In fact, alarm bells have been ringing for longer than 50 years. I’d like to show you part of a very important speech from the year 1961.
President Eisenhower had just served two full terms in office, and he was just about to hand over the presidency to John F. Kennedy. Despite his own military background as a five-star general and the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower chose one of the most important moments of his presidency, his own farewell address to the nation, to warn America of the dangers of the corrupting influence of what he famously termed the military-industrial complex.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations. Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists.
I am an American, Mike, and there’s a lot of criticism of our country and where it’s been and where it’s going, and I’m part of that group. I use a phrase picked up from Chalmers Johnson called sorrows of empire. And what he points out is that when you have what I call forever wars, and that seems to be what’s happening since 9-11.
Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya, add in Yemen still today, on top of disruptions everywhere. These wars are expensive. We’ve never had the stand down of our armies. And at the same time, the extended powers of the government have taken away a lot of our personal freedoms. So publicly in the NSA revelations from Snowden, but we as people were built on a country with mild government.
Restrictions on what the government can do were the constitutional sources. You combine wars, personal freedom loss, and a control of us through the deceptions, and you’ve got a system that feeds on itself and we can’t afford. One point two trillion dollars if you add the spooks, the hidden parts, the veterans, the energy departments, nuclear operations for weapons all together, and a bit of interest on the debt, it’s almost half our budget that we spend on this military.
And that’s not a good direction. I hope we could go to more peace and avoid the sorrows of empire that are too expensive. And when you spend $1.2 trillion on your military, the effects are destructive on your economy. In other words, the supposed spending for strengthening our country on military is destroying our economy.
When we were in Rome, it was to see how a great society, a great empire can completely collapse and fade into history because of deficit spending and currency debasement, because of all the things that the U.S. is doing today, because they were trying to fund these armies that are occupying foreign lands just like the U.S.
is doing today, because they were trying to have bread and circuses, what we call guns and butter, while they were funding all of this war. And all the deficit spending and currency debasement to pay for it is one of the key factors in what brought Rome down. And this great civilization faded into history and not only that but they lost for a long time. The technologies were lost.
All the knowledge and insight that they had. The standard of living. I mean, we were plunged into the dark ages. But there’s another side of this story that is rarely heard or explained. To me, what you’re about to learn is something that absolutely cements the importance of sound money and how it is foundational to a prosperous society.
As Rome was struggling in the late 4th century, Emperor Flavius Theodosius divided the Roman Empire into two parts, each to be ruled by one of his own sons. The Western Roman Empire kept Rome as its capital. Economically, it was soon crippled beyond salvation by the repetition of the misguided monetary practices you’ve learned about in these episodes, and it’s generally considered by historians to have fallen around the year 476 AD. While the Western Empire crumbled, the Eastern Empire flourished for a further 1,000 years.
Its capital was Constantinople, known today as Istanbul. The Eastern Empire changed their official language to Greek, and even though their own people at the time referred to themselves as being part of the Roman Empire, today we know them by a different name, the Byzantine Empire. So why did the Western Roman Empire fall while the East flourished? I believe a major part of the answer is contained in two simple words, sound money.
The Byzantine Empire based their monetary system on a coin originally minted on a small scale by our friend Emperor Diocletian. It was called the Solitus. It weighed just 4.5 grams, or one-seventh of an ounce, and was made of pure gold. The Byzantine rulers had learned from their own history, and they made a conscious choice to avoid the continual pattern of debasement that Rome had suffered from, with amazing results.
They defended the purity of the Solitus for a further 600 years, They defended the purity of the Solitas for a further 600 years until 1034 when you guessed it the same old story started to play out. The debasement of the Solitas was gradual at first but it soon accelerated and the coin was eliminated less than 60 years later in 1092.
A new gold coin the Hippopyrone was issued in place of the Solitas and its purity was maintained at 85% gold until the early 1200s until it too was debased. By the 1350s it had no gold content at all and served merely as a unit of account. Is it a coincidence that this time period matches that of the decline of the Byzantine Empire? It’s impossible to say for sure, but I’d like to say once again that I believe that the quality of a society is directly proportional to the quality of its money.
There are many factors that all contributed to the fall of Rome, but in these episodes, I wanted to draw your attention primarily to the economics, because when you study monetary history, two things become crystal clear. The first is that bureaucratic, managed economies always lead to disaster, and the second is that monetary debasement brings the fall of empires. So could this same pattern of currency debasement that we have seen time and time again throughout history happen to the United States?
Take a look around. It’s happening right now. But the big difference this time is that it’s like all those other times in history, times a million. This time it’s global. But what concerns me most isn’t the loss of our financial wealth, it’s the loss of our freedom. All of this meddling in the free markets that they have done and the price that we are going to pay because of that meddling is going to cause a loss in confidence in the free market system and capitalism.
We don’t have free markets, and we haven’t had since 1913. You cannot have free markets if you don’t have free market money. The currency is 50% of every transaction there is in society and if you have a small group of men at the central bank having a meeting each month in the United States, it’s called the Open Market Committee, the FOMC, deciding how much currency there’s going to be in the system and what the cost of that currency is, the interest rates. That’s a manipulated market by definition. You’ve
got a few people deciding what it’s going to be. That’s 50% of every transaction, therefore there is no transaction in this society that isn’t manipulated. So we can’t, we don’t have, when people say that the free markets are failing, we do not have free markets. When people say that capitalism is failing, we don’t have capitalism. We’ve got cronyism.
We’ve got special favors being granted by Congress to the people that lobby them, and it skews the economy and warps the economy and creates all of these artificial bubbles that end up popping and then everybody loves living in a bubble so they just want the Fed to create the next one. What’s happening in Washington doesn’t indicate that all of a sudden they’re going to gain in wisdom and do the tough, make the tough choices which is sort of like getting somebody off drugs, you know, and people don’t want to quit the tough choices, which is sort of like getting somebody off drugs, you
know, and people don’t want to quit the drugs. And our system is based on debt and inflation, and they’re not going to wean themselves off. So we have to anticipate there’s going to be a major collapse. But then the big question is, are we going to have a greater move toward totalitarianism and give up all our freedom, or are we going to say we still have a spirit left in this country to say, yes, we overstretched and we know what the alternative could be and we can build a much better society?
Milton Friedman, the great economist, once said, When government, in pursuit of good intentions, tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost comes at inefficiency, lack of innovation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.
In the United States, government has gone way too far. It is proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, time after time throughout history, that managed economies do not work. Free markets have always won and they have always provided a higher work. Free markets have always won and they have always provided a higher standard of living.
When people cry out for the government to do something about it, they’re asking for the government to manage the economy. They are asking for the government to lower their standard of living. Ultimately what you get is the USSR or Mao’s China. That is what a managed economy brings you. It’s time for you to take action. It’s time for you to get educated on this, to find out more, and then to voice your opinion, to make yourself heard.
If we want changes in the economy and changes on a monetary system, change in our foreign policy, the people have to speak out and decide that they want to change, and they have to make it very clear to the politicians that that’s what they expect. As a matter of fact, that’s one area where I tend to be more optimistic, because I think the people are learning with the work that you’ve done and others.
They’re learning something about monetary policy. But the most important thing is that people understand the nature of freedom and the role of government and money being a major part of all that. So now that we’ve seen the economics of the fall of Rome, it’s time to take a look at the options in front of us for the USA.
Will we choose more debasement, more war, more intrusive government, more cronyism and special interests, more taxation and regulation, and less freedom? Or will we choose sound money, stable foreign policy, restrained government, a level playing field of fair laws for everyone, sensible taxation and regulation, and maximum freedom? I want to thank you for watching this series and for sharing these videos with your friends and family.
If you’d like to learn more, join me at HiddenSecretsOfMoney.com for more interviews and discussions. Much of this episode was based on material from my book and you can download a copy for free. Until then, thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time.
